An end to ‘rubber rooms’

There were smiles and handshakes all around on Thursday as the city and the United Federation of Teachers announced an agreement to end the practice of maintaining “rubber rooms” for teachers facing disciplinary action.

There are seven Teacher Reassignment Centers, as these “rubber rooms” are formally known, around the city, including at Edgewater Plaza in Rosebank. They are effectively holding tanks for public school teachers who have been accused of wrongdoing or incompetence and removed from their schools to await disciplinary hearings.

There, they can read, surf the Web and even sleep — far from the children they are paid to teach. But they still draw full pay and benefits, often for months and even years until their hearings. One has reportedly been in a reassignment center for seven years.

There are currently 550 teachers and about 100 other Department of Education staff members, costing the city some $30 million in wasted pay.

Some are undoubtedly guilty as charged. Some are innocent victims of overbearing principals or malicious children with grudges.

The need for such centers for teachers who have been removed from the classroom, rightly or wrongly, is unavoidable. What aggravated this situation is that the city has never allocated enough resources to see that these teachers’ cases are processed and disposed of in a timely manner. And, in all honesty, there are undoubtedly those teachers who figured there are worse things than being able to idle away the school day at full pay for months — or more — on end.

This practice has echoes of the old Soviet Bloc. Accused teachers, whatever their culpability, have the right to have their day “in court.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg rightly called it “an absurd abuse of tenure.”

The practice has been going on since the 1990s when it quietly emerged as a way of dealing with teachers who have pending disciplinary actions. But after the practice was exposed in the last few years, it became a source of embarrassment both for the city and the union. And while UFT officials focus solely on the shame inflicted on teachers so banished — and certainly many have been falsely accused — there were certainly some who deserved to be removed. They all deserve due process in a timely manner, not an indefinite sentence in limbo.

Under the agreement, DOE officials will have 10 days to file incompetence charges against teachers who have been removed from the classroom and 60 days for charges of misconduct. A teacher who isn’t formally charged within those stated time periods must be returned to class. And teachers will now be assigned DOE-related administrative tasks while on hiatus.

The agreement also requires the DOE to file charges within three days in the case of any teacher it seeks to suspend without pay.

In addition, the city will spend another $2 million to hire more attorneys to speed up the hearing. The mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein promised that the current backlog will be cleared by December, when the “rubber rooms” will finally close.

It’s about time. Our question is why it took them so long to realize that this was an atrocious situation, not to mention an utter waste of taxpayers’ money.

It’s telling that Mayor Bloomberg seemed to scoff at the widespread attention this scandalous situation has gotten in the press in recent years, as if the press had been too interested in the problem.

But then, neither the administration nor the UFT complained publicly about “rubber rooms” before the press got interested and embarrassed those who had tacitly agreed to this practice. And we’d guess that if it weren’t for that exposure by the press, it would have continued for a long time to come.